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Syrian’s Defection Signals Eroding Support for Assad

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The defection of a young general close to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria has provided the most telling sign yet of eroding support for his government among even the most elite and trusted Sunni Muslims, who serve as a critical pillar of the security forces and civilian administration.

But while the defector, Brig. Gen. Manaf Tlass, gained world attention when he fled Damascus on Thursday, President Assad’s bigger military challenge is the swelling number of silent objectors — soldiers of all ranks lacking the means to flee, or the interest, but no longer cooperating with the government. Instead of responding to the call to duty, they are staying home, abandoning their posts as the opposition grows bolder, stronger and more effective, said Syrian military experts and defectors.

Mr. Assad’s loyal inner circle and core support remains the Alawite community, a minority Muslim sect. But Alawites constitute no more than 12 percent of the 23 million population, so the Assad family has for decades relied on the majority Sunnis for their legitimacy and practical support. Sunnis make up the bulk of the nation’s foot soldiers, hold posts throughout the bureaucracy and dominate the elite in the business community.

A few Sunnis have always held high-profile positions in the government and military. General Tlass’s father, Mustafa, like his son a Sunni, was a confidant of the president’s father, Hafez, and served as defense minister for 32 years under both men.

But the uprising fueled almost entirely by the Sunni community — some 75 percent of the population — has gradually formed a deepening sectarian rift, chipping away at that crucial support among Sunnis. As the government crackdown intensified, leaving by some estimates as many as 17,000 dead, according to the United Nations, at least one deputy minister and 15 generals, all of them Sunnis, have defected to Turkey, 5 in the past few weeks alone.

The numbers of those who are actively undermining the government by simply refusing to comply, rather than join the opposition, are far larger, however. The Syrian Army of roughly 400,000 troops has been more affected by this type of attrition than by defections, experts said. Of the 80,000 young men expected to show up for their mandatory military service this year — most of them Sunnis — experts said that virtually none have responded.

Photo

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton with other delegates on Friday, at a conference in Paris on the conflict in Syria.Credit
Pool photo by Brendan Smialowski

The distrust between the Sunnis and Alawites in the military has grown so deep that at night, when Sunnis are put on guard duty at key installations, there are always Alawite guards assigned to watch the Sunni soldiers, said a colonel who defected to Turkey.

“If there is any doubts about their loyalty they could be imprisoned or killed,” he said. “Many of my Sunni colleagues are in jail.”

Many experts said that the government has tried to inoculate itself from over-reliance on the Sunni community and has long been planning for the very uprising it is now facing. As far back as the 1950s, Alawites already constituted 50 percent to 60 percent of the noncommissioned army officers, said Aram Nerguizian, an expert in Middle East military strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “There have been no meaningful defections from the Alawite community,” he said.

Many officers who have defected tell the same story, of a military that relies largely on Alawites.

During the officer training course at the military college, each class of about 1,200 men consisted of around 900 to 1,000 Alawites, about 100 Sunni Muslims, and roughly 100 others representing Syria’s patchwork of sects and ethnic minorities.

“They made it this way so the army would not defect,” said a Sunni Muslim colonel with 25 years in the army, speaking in an interview just days after he reached the southern Turkish city of Antakya in June. He spoke anonymously to protect relatives left behind.

In addition to the sect loyalty, the government has managed to slow the erosion of its support — and at least win the neutrality of those who choose to stay home. Even officers who do not report for duty still draw salaries and pensions in a broadly successful attempt to buy their acquiescence.

Many officers, wary of possible foreign military intervention someday, choose to stay because they want to help prevent in Syria what happened in Iraq after the 2003 American invasion, when the army was disbanded and career military men were thrown out of work. Others stay because they see no credible alternative to Mr. Assad’s rule.

All government employees have had their salaries cut except army and intelligence officers, the Sunni colonel said. The colonel, his wife and three children fled southern Syria with basically the clothes on their backs, leaving behind a house, another car and what he said was $100,000 in his savings account, the kind of loss that has dissuaded others from following suit.

“Eighty percent of the officers who want to defect are Sunnis,” he said. But Sunni troops and officers are regarded with distrust by their Alawite peers.

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General Tlass, with a rich businessman for a brother and a wealthy widowed sister in Paris, did not have to worry about financial repercussions and only moved when much of his immediate family was out of harm’s way, experts noted.

“I don’t see this as a politically motivated defection, it is jumping off the sinking ship of the regime,” said Akil Hashem, a former Syrian tank commander now living in the United States. “I sense a weakening, but it is not the weakening we are looking for.”

Out of fear of arming potential opponents, many ordinary units made up of Sunni conscripts are not deployed. Instead the government relies on heavily Alawite elite units and intelligence services to suppress the uprising. Estimates range for about 60,000 men together in the Republican Guards — where General Tlass served as a commander — and the Fourth Division, and another estimated 150,000 in the four main intelligence services. Eighty percent of such units are believed to be Alawite, as are many of the thuggish gangs, or Shabiha, who unleash violence on those opposing the government.

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Bashar al-Assad, left, and Gen. Manaf Tlass, right, at a Baath Party meeting in Damascus in 2000.Credit
Sana/Handout/European Pressphoto Agency

“When the military gets new weapons like a new tank, it goes immediately to the Fourth Division and the Republican Guards,” Mr. Hashem said. “This is the main force the regime depends on to end the revolution. It is not likely to have defections in these units.”

The only way to speed defections, he said, is to create a safe territorial zone within Syria where officers of any ethnicity can flee.

But that was not a main part of the discussions on Friday in Paris, where foreign ministers representing 100 countries in the Friends of Syria group met with the opposition in the third of a series of meetings to address the crisis.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called for increased pressure on Syria to move toward a transitional government, as well as for United Nations sanctions, which Russia and China have consistently blocked. Arab leaders called for going around the Security Council to aid the opposition.

Mrs. Clinton also suggested greater international efforts to move China and Russia, Syria’s main international backers, to cease shielding Mr. Assad. Moscow later termed her comments “inappropriate.”

In another Syria development, Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, said in a report to the Security Council on Friday that the cease-fire monitoring mission in Syria, suspended three weeks ago because of unprecedented violence and physical danger to its members, should not be disbanded. Rather, he said, it should shift to other activities inside the country aimed at encouraging a political solution to the conflict.

His report also said the 300-member mission should be consolidated in Damascus for safety reasons. The mandate for the mission expires July 20.

Reporting was contributed by Hwaida Saad and Dalal Mawad from Beirut, Dan Bilefsky from Paris, Alan Cowell from London and Rick Gladstone from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on July 7, 2012, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Defections Add New Pressures Against Assad. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe